TEACHER AWARENESS

Teacher awareness as a whole creates a massive amount of self-esteem for children inside and outside the classroom. For instance, if there were a child that needed motivation to do well on a test, hopefully a teacher would give a well thought out pep talk to that person. Teachers are supposed to be role models, or people should look up to them when an answer is needed. When teachers lack awareness, inside and outside the school, there is a dearth of a role model. This can lead to puzzled students and essentially worse grades.

Students nowadays often are a part of extracurricular activities such as sports, making them have to start doing their homework late. Sometimes in the worst cases teacher will be oblivious of a major event. Not only would grades slip, there would be more and more officious acts in attempts to have a new role model step into place, leading to the worst of all, bullying and exclusion.

66% of high school participate in sports activities. 62% participate in school clubs and extracurricular activities. 79% of America's middle and high school students regularly participate in activities both after school and on weekends and 57% have some kind of non-school activity nearly every day. In a survey for the students that went into participants of extracurricular activities, 50.4% had no unexcused absences (36.2% of non-participants this applied to) 50.7% students never skipped classes (42.3% of non-participants this applied to) 30.6% students had a GPA of 3.0 or higher (10.8% in comparison to non-participants) 29.8% of students received the highest score ranking (quartile)(14.2% in comparison to non-participants)

WHAT THE STUDENTS ARE SAYING Q: Do you think that your teachers motivate you? Why or why not? A: Not all that much. It’s like a bad team in sports. The teachers just go through the motions. And when the teacher needs to teach a lot of things in class, pressure is put onto the student to do even more to learn. Q: If there was to be a bully in school making fun of someone, who would be the first to stop it? A: Students. Teachers expect their students never to bully in the first place, so the teachers won’t stop the bullying at times. Q: Do you ever feel that you need help in a class but the teacher is unaware that you need the help? A: Yes. Once, a teacher decided to move on with the question that was believed was important to the discussion. Instead, the teacher focused on the class as a whole. Q: Do you think teachers should help out more in school? A: Yes. Extra help should always be available when a student is struggling and the teachers should recognize when events are going on. Q: Give examples of what the best teacher really should be in the world. A: Easy to understand, sympathetic, laid back, and on task.

SOLUTION We propose that teachers should try to be more aware of major events happening at that period of time. In addition, teachers should give students more time to do their homework, so if they have a large amount of work one night, they can organize themselves to actually do on time.

HOW THE SOLUTION AFFECTS THE COMMUNITY Our solution would affect the community by enabling children to do more out of school activities, creating more jobs in the community. In addition, if the homework was to be given for a later date, people would learn to be more organized. People would then be able to help the community because of their organization. This community often finds it is inhibited by poor organization skills.

SCENARIO #1 One day, a student does not need extra help; however, the pupil would like to review with the teacher to make sure that he/she did not miss anything that was studied. The day of the test, the student appears to be absent and misses the test completely. What do you think happened to the student? To no one’s surprise, the review WAS significant for the student to understand since the student did not comprehend something that was shown in the book. The student could not go in for extra help due to the budget cuts that disallowed teachers from doing this. The student was studying all night trying to understand the concept that he/she did not quite get until the student fell flat on his face with exhaustion. The exhaustion led to an illness that prevented the student from going to school.